Frankish expansion

Frankish expansion was a period of European history which took place over the course of 100 years from 714 to 814 AD, during which time the kingdom of Francia came to rule over large portions of Central Europe and Italy, in addition to being overlords over several Eastern European peoples.

Background
Under King Clovis I (48l-511), the Franks made themselves the masters of what had been Roman Gaul. He and his successors are known as the Merovingian Dynasty. The Franks were a Germanic-speaking people, one of a number that, in the 5th century, had spilled across the frontiers of the Western Roman Empire. Under Frankish law, land - like other possessions - had to be shared out equally among a man's sons. Equitable, perhaps, but where kingship was concerned, a recipe for war. A cycle of civil conflict developed in which individual rulers reunited the Frankish realms by force of arms, only to divide them up again among their sons. The authority of the Merovingian kings became undermined by a rise in aristocratic factionalism. The position "Mayor of the Palace"—the official charged with ensuring the smooth running ofthe royal household - grew in importance. From 687 it was monopolized by the Arnulfing family.

History
By the 8th century, the authority of the Merovingians was greatly reduced. Power had passed to the aristocracy and to the "Mayors of the Palace," but even here dissension was rife. In Austrasia Pepin II had been "Dux" (duke or leader) since 680. An invitation to intervene in a dispute between aristocratic factions in Neustria in 687 saw Pepin dominating the realm until his death in 714. This precipitated a crisis. Lacking surviving sons, Pepin's widow, Plectrude, tried to secure the Mayor's ofﬁce for an eight-year-old grandson, Theudoald, but Neustrian nobles elevated their own candidate, Ragenfred, to Mayor. Then in 715 they elected a new king, Chilperic II.

Franks fight Franks
The Neustrians invaded Austrasia and, as Plectrude was agreeing terms with them, an illegitimate son of Pepin's, Charles, whom she had been keeping in captivity, escaped. He attacked the Neustrian army at Ambleve, near Liege, as it withdrew, then forced Plectrude to surrender power. Now ruling Austrasia, Charles defeated the Neustrians at Vincy, near Cambrai, in 717. Chilperic and Ragenfred allied themselves to Duke Eudo of Aquitaine, but Charles defeated their armies at Soissons in 718. In 718-19 Charles also subdued the Frisians and drove back the Saxons, who had been attacking his territories from the east. On the death of Chilperic II, Charles secured the election of a Merovingian king of his choosing, but it took him until 730 to bring western Neustria completely under control.

Muslim Arabs and Berbers had been raiding Aquitaine and Provence from Spain since 721. In 732 Duke Eudo of Aquitaine was unable to resist a raid led by Abd ar-Rahman, the governor of al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, and called upon Charles for assistance. He won a decisive victory over the Muslims at the battle of Poitiers in 732 and, when Eudo died in 735, seized control of his duchy.

From 734 Charles ruled without a king to legitimize his decisions. At his death in 741, he bequeathed authority to his sons. One, Carloman, retired to a monastery in 747; the other, Pepin, in 751 deposed the last Merovingian and had himself crowned King Pepin III, the ﬁrst of the Carolingian line. When he died in 768, his kingdom was divided between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. A struggle for power seemed inevitable, but Carloman died in 771 and his men accepted Charles as king.

Saxon Wars
In 772, Charles ("Charles the Great" or Charlemagne) led an army against the Saxons, whose incessant raids were still causing problems in the northeast. His attention was diverted to Italy in 773 where the Lombard king, Desiderius, was supporting dissident Franks and putting pressure on the papacy. Charles besieged Pavia, the capital of Lombardy, until Desiderius surrendered in June 774. Then, with papal support, Charles persuaded the Lombard dukes to name him as their new king. Meanwhile, the Saxons took advantage of his absence in Italy to rise up once again, launching a series of attacks into the northern part of Hesse. Charlemagne responded with another campaign against them. Up to now, these campaigns had been punitive expeditions to keep the enemy at bay. But this began to seem unrealistic. At the royal assembly held in Quierzy, Picardy, in January 775, Charlemagne announced his plans for an invasion - subjugating the Saxons once and for all. That summer’s campaign was brutally successful. Although an advance force was defeated at the Weser River by Widukind, Charlemagne’s main army conquered huge territories, destroying the symbols of the Saxons' pagan religion wherever he went.

Setbacks and successes
Once again Charlemagne had shown his strength over the Saxons, yet once again it all seemed set to unravel, as a revolt in the early part of 776 compelled him to march south in haste to restore his rule in northern Italy. Hardly was his back turned than the Saxons rose up in rebellion. Within a few weeks, however, Charlemagne reappeared and crushed the Lombard revolt, robbing the Saxons of their spirit. This time, they accepted his authority. He promptly reinforced it by building a fortiﬁed city named after himself: “Karlsburg” (now Paderborn) was an urban center and a statement. Charlemagne was not always able to make his authority felt so easily, however. An invasion of Muslim Spain in 778 was repulsed and ended in disgrace with his rearguard mauled by a force of Basques in the Pyrenees. Even so, he later established a secure foothold to the south of the mountain range with the capture of Barcelona in 801. Meanwhile, he had been fighting on other fronts, his invasion of Bavaria in 777 bringing him into confrontation with the Avars, steppe nomads who dominated the Danube Valley, but whose empire was disintegrating. Yet again, however, the Saxons exploited his absences to rise up against his rule. A renewed revolt surfaced in the year 778, and though Charlemagne suppressed the uprising, it was clear that the Saxons were never simply going to acquiesce to Frankish rule. It took until 782 for the king and his Franks to re-establish their hold: a vengeful Charlemagne supposedly conducted mass-executions during the Massacre of Verden. An effort was made to stamp out pagan practices among the Saxons to ease their absorption into the Frankish state. Not until 804, after the deportation of a number of Saxons into Francia, were they ﬁnally paciﬁed.

Fighting a new enemy
By the time Charlemagne was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in 800, there were signs of "overstretch." Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons had brought his empire up against the frontier Of the Danes in southern Jutland. King Gudfred was sending ﬂeets to attack the northern Frankish coast. Charlemagne at ﬁrst had no answer to this problem, but after Gudfred was succeeded by his nephew, Hemming, in 810, the emperor was able to push him into a peace treaty through a combination of diplomatic persuasion and military force.